Commentary on the Seventh Decade

More poems and prayers for the sixties

Prayers and poems are similar in that they use symbol and metaphor to express large thoughts. To get the most from both, you have to slow down. You can’t skim a prayer or scan a poem to fully savor it. But slowing down is something we have to practice, especially if our careers are about numbers, deadline pressures, and multi-tasking.

Summer

Every solstice
should be as this one, suspended
between evening
and the slow coming on of stars,

the great bear first, then the jeweled
crown. Let every solstice pause,
linger in a meadow, imagined
or real, blue with lupine,

the fields wide, the self small,
a place afloat between this
fixed earth and the transparencies
of clouds. Give silence room,

there anger seeps away. Out of the hidden,
fireflies may come to semaphore
a blessing. Beneath the deepening sky,
bright wands and an old cartography of peace.
Jean Connor